Deeplinks Blog posts about Locational Privacy

When the Supreme Court said in United States v. Jonesthat planting a GPS device on a vehicle is a physical intrusion that amounts to a Fourth Amendment "search," the government should have gotten the memo: the police have to get a probable cause warrant issued by a neutral magistrate before installing one of those devices on a car to track a person's location. Amazingly, that hasn't stopped the government from coming up with new ways to argue that it can use GPS devices to track people's movements without a warrant. So we teamed up with the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in an amicus brief filed last week urging a federal appeals court to reject these arguments.

Location privacy took a hit in California yesterday when Governor Jerry Brown vetoedSB 1434, an EFF- and ACLU-sponsored bill that would have required law enforcement to apply for a search warrant in order to obtain location tracking information.

UPDATE: This morning, rather than face contempt charges, Twitterhanded overthe data requested by the government, under seal, to the New York Criminal Court. Twitter was faced with a terrible choice between giving ground on its fight for user privacy, or risk a potentially expensive contempt of court citation.

Location privacy generally, and cell site tracking specifically, have been two hot issues this year, particularly since the Supreme Court's January ruling in United States v. Jones that installing a GPS device on a car without a search warrant violated the Fourth Amendment. After Jones, we were optimistic that both courts and legislatures would begin to take location privacy seriously and demand warrants before granting law enforcement access to a map of our every movements over an extended period of time. But it hasn't turned out that way.

Does the government need a search warrant to get information about your Twitter activity -- information like deleted tweets, other users you communicate with, and the list of IP addresses you used to connect to the service? Today we joined the ACLU, New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and Public Citizen in telling a New York appeals court that the answer to that question is yes.